Unlocked
by cruisedirector
Summary: Lionel can't keep secrets from Myrtle. Or Bertie, apparently.


_Last Year_

When he arrived home, Lionel could tell at once from Myrtle's raised chin and rigid posture that she was angry. She remained civil while the boys were in the dining room, but as soon as they all asked to be excused, her eyes narrowed and she dropped something onto the table.

"What's this?" asked Lionel in the moment it took him to realize.

It was his mother's locket, the only valuable piece of jewelry she had ever owned, with a stone cameo carving of a woman mounted on the front. Lionel had kept it in the drawer in the table by his side of the bed for as long as he and Myrtle had lived in this house.

Sliding her fingernail beneath the clasp, Myrtle opened the locket. There were a few strands of hair inside, wound up around each other in a circle to hold them in place in the concave space at the back.

"That isn't my hair, Lionel, and it's certainly not your mother's. Whose is it?"

Lionel put on the calm, thoughtful expression he usually reserved for patients telling him painful stories or for his sons when they were in some sort of trouble. He tried to conjure some excuse, but he couldn't think of any benign explanation.

He knew that he was going to have to tell Myrtle the truth, though she might consider the truth to be no less incriminating than what she apparently feared. It wasn't as if he had anyone's privacy to protect but his own, at this date.

"It's the King's."

"The King's," Myrtle repeated, a hint of mockery in her voice. "The King of England? I suppose he gave it to you in a love letter."

Ignoring the barb, Lionel shook his head. "He didn't _give_ it to me at all. He's - he was my patient, when he was the Duke of York. The first time we ever met, I had him put on earphones, and when he took them off, a bit of his hair was caught in the wire."

As he spoke, Lionel watched Myrtle's face. Her expression changed from wide-eyed incredulity to amused relief to the fond sympathy which he was now facing. The anger remained underneath - she was not happy that he hadn't told her before, that's what the confrontation had been about - but, as was usually the case with Myrtle, her temper was under control. "So you saved his hair and put it in your mother's locket?" she clarified.

"Not at first. I folded it in a piece of paper and put it in an envelope." If only he had left it there in his desk, Lionel thought, fiddling with the chain attached to the locket to give his hand something to do. "At the time, I doubted I'd ever see him again. I didn't impress him very much."

Myrtle's eyes were on the strands of hair in the locket. "I gather that he came back?"

"Yes. For several years. He was a model patient - always did his exercises, even right after his father died."

Her gaze lifted, studied his face. Again, Lionel tried to school his features into indifference. "But?" she prompted.

Lionel reached for the locket. He had been so humiliated, that day when he'd gone to apologize even though Bertie had been the one calling Lionel names and making nasty comments about his parents. To be tossed out in the rain by that pompous prig of an equerry...his fury afterward had been uncharacteristically slow to fade, until very recently, when Lionel had realized it had transformed into regret.

He was all too familiar with the way people often used anger to protect themselves from grief. Even Myrtle, who'd just come at him with eyes blazing and accusation in her voice. Lionel doubted that she'd believed he'd been unfaithful; he wouldn't have kept a lock of hair even from a distant admirer in that particular piece of jewelry. She was only upset that he'd kept a secret from her locked away at their bedside.

Why was it a secret? He'd told himself at one time that anyone would save a lock of hair from the son of the King. Was he going to tell Myrtle that? Or did he dare to give voice to the rest of it, that he'd realized that Bertie's parentage and position had ceased to matter to him at precisely the moment those very things had separated them, probably forever?

"He's very busy," Lionel said without inflection, repeating the equerry's despised words. No matter how many times he replayed that scene in his mind, he couldn't think of a way to change the outcome, while the earlier scene with Bertie - the one in the park - he couldn't stand to remember at all. "His speech is improved. He must have impressed the Accession Council. No doubt he has visits now with some specialist with a long list of letters after his name."

Myrtle reached across the table, closing her hand around Lionel's, pressing the locket shut in his palm in the process. "I'm sorry, love." She didn't mean only about having made it sound as though she suspected him of something that she must have known was absurd, since she knew him so well. She would know, too, that he didn't have the King's hair locked away in a drawer to demonstrate monarchist pride, yet she wouldn't try to demand the part of the story that Lionel couldn't bear to tell.

Forcing a smile, he shrugged a bit. "Silly to keep it, I know." He kept his voice as light as he could. "It isn't as if I could sell it as a souvenir. Even if someone else wanted it, how could I prove whose hair it was?"

Myrtle smiled sadly back. Naturally, he hadn't fooled her at all. "Keep it anyway," she suggested. "How many people have a lock of hair from the King? Someday you may think of it as a happy reminder."

Someday it was possible that she might be right. The locket, and the hair, went back into the drawer. Lionel tried to make himself forget about it until the sunlit afternoon when his phone finally rang, and, a few days later, he dropped the King's shilling into the drawer beside the treasure.

_Next Year_

By the time they had finished the exercises, the late afternoon sun slanted through the Palace windows. Bertie asked Lionel to wait as he opened a drawer in his desk, then smiled when he came over to place a box in Lionel's hands.

"What's this?" asked Lionel in the moment it took him to realize.

"It is your birthday, isn't it? I checked with your wife to be sure I had the right day this year." Bertie looked oddly shy, as he hadn't been in many months with Lionel - certainly not since the coronation - and Lionel was sure that Bertie hadn't known when his birthday was the year before, or at least hadn't given him a gift. Lionel certainly would have remembered it.

"It _is_ my birthday, though at my age, I'd rather stop counting," he replied, laughing a bit. He'd given Bertie books for birthdays, but this box was too small to contain a book. It looked like an expensive jewelry box, and when Lionel opened it, the velvet padding held a heavy object wrapped in cloth...a gold pocket watch.

"I asked your wife if you might like it, and she said she thought you would, though she made a suggestion that I thought was rather curious. Well, perhaps you won't think it's as curious as I did. Open the back."

Lionel's fingers faltered. He knew before the metal separated what he would find in that small compartment. Sure enough, there was a lock of hair, messily cut, as if the person doing the cutting had had little experience performing such a task.

"Myrtle told you to do that?" he asked Bertie, grateful that his voice remained steady, though he tried to chuckle just in case it wavered.

"Yes. I've always wondered whether she was as shocked to meet me as she seemed. Had you really never told her about us?"

"Certainly not in any detail. Only that we'd met." Myrtle's performance had indeed been admirable when she'd found Their Majesties in her home, though Lionel had thought that, even knowing, any woman would have had a fit to discover that her husband was serving tea to the Queen at their table. He tilted the watch a bit to watch the hair catch the light, though the gold case overwhelmed it. "Did she give you any reason why?"

"She said you'd like it. I thought, Perhaps it's an Australian custom?'" Lionel realized that he was shaking his head, more in astonishment at Myrtle than in answer to the question, but Bertie paused, studying Lionel's profile, since Lionel had his head down and was staring at the watch. "Do _you_ know why?"

It was more of a demand than a question. "Yes," Lionel admitted reluctantly. "I...collect hair."

"That's very peculiar." Bertie's tone wasn't so much disturbed as amused. "From all your pupils? Or from all your friends?"

What mattered, Lionel decided, was that Bertie had put the hair into the case before he ever asked. Closing the back of the watch, Lionel took a deep breath and said, "From all the princes of my acquaintance."

With a soft laugh, Bertie reached into his own pocket and pulled out his own watch, holding it up for inspection. When Lionel examined it, he realized that it was, in fact, identical to the one Bertie had just given him.

"I had a pair made," Bertie told him. "These are the only two like them in the world." Raising his hand to his own head, Bertie pushed at the hair on one side as if feeling for the spot where he was missing the lock that was curled in the back of the watch in Lionel's palm. "I suppose for balance you should give me some of yours, too."

"Do you have a pair of scissors?" Again, Lionel was amazed at how even his voice sounded. He'd expected it to shake like Bertie's during his worst moments of jaw-locked stammering. At least all those years of training were good for something. He waited as Bertie crossed the room, looking in the desk until he found what he needed and returned.

There was a decorative mirror on the long wall. Lionel rose and walked over to it, taking the scissors from Bertie, who followed him. Lionel's fingers stayed surprisingly steady as he pushed them through his hair, tugging up a lock and cutting it off.

"I'll keep it safe." Bertie still looked a bit puzzled as he took the hair from Lionel, but he hadn't stopped smiling. "No one will ever guess who gave me such a luxuriant lock of hair."

Pulling out his own watch again, Bertie put Lionel's hair inside and tucked it away, then picked up the watch he'd given Lionel and stepped very close to place it in the pocket of Lionel's waistcoat.

"And you had better keep this close to your heart."

"I will. Thank you." Lionel doubted that he could fool Bertie about why his heart was pounding beneath Bertie's hand any more than he could ever fool Myrtle, whom he knew would feign innocence when he asked her why on Earth she had told the King that Lionel might like a lock of his hair.

"Thank _you_." Bertie patted his chest over the waistcoat pocket. "You aren't going to tell me why, are you. Please?"

Lionel fought the urge to reach up and stroke Bertie's hair. "For sentimental reasons," he said, with such an air of affected drama that Bertie laughed. 


End file.
